The Lexicographer’s Dream Audience: Dictionary Use among English Majors at a Slovenian University

Abstract

Abstract Interviews with undergraduate students from the University of Ljubljana, who are majoring in English and can be considered language specialists, investigated habits of dictionary use, look-up abilities, and perceptions of the utility and quality of definitions and illustrative examples. This contrasts with a parallel study (Farina et al. 2019) with undergraduates majoring in business and economics. Like the parallel study, this study was based on fourteen questions and nine contexts containing a clearly-marked common word used in an infrequent sense; participants had to locate the sense in a dictionary that, at the time of the studies, was the online Merriam–Webster Learner’s Dictionary, rebranded today as The Britannica Dictionary. Participants were asked to think aloud as they looked up words. Among other results, the study revealed that its participants, while they were linguistically-educated and experienced, did not fully grasp the complexity of presenting dictionary information online.